Bell and Telus have apparently upgraded hundreds, if not thousands, of their towers in Canada to implement HSPA/HSPA+ coverage on 850/1900 MHz, coast to coast. In Newfoundland the new HSPA network seems actually bigger then the old CDMA 1x/EVDO network!

HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) is a mobile communications protocol related to UMTS, which in turn is closely related to GSM/EDGE, which is derived from GSM.

Bell, up to now a committed CDMA carrier, has just introduced several inexpensive phones and smartphones that support HSPA, have a SIM card and are claimed to work in over 200 countries, which would indicate that they are dual-mode handsets and also support regular GSM, at least on non-N.American GSM frequencies (900 and 1800 MHz). It is common for UMTS handsets to also offer GSM support.

I had a closer look at the cheapest of those new phones, Nokia 2730 ($29.95 at Bell). It's your typical GSM phone, it works on GSM networks worldwide and on four UMTS frequencies:

HSPA definitely has poorer coverage then EVDO, at least for now, even in Alberta, the best covered province in Canada. From Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario to Alberta border there is no HSPA available at all, except for the city of Winnipeg. This is 2000 km stretch without HSPA, where EVDO is mostly available. The only place where HSPA coverage seems to be better than 1x/EVDO is Newfoundland.

It looks like they really did quite amazing job, creating a huge new network in just about a year. Once they upgrade Manitoba, Saskatchewan and N.Ontario, CDMA dinosaur in Canada can be finally laid to rest.

Although technically speaking, the new network is called HSPA, for the end user without background in telecommunications engineering, it looks and feels like GSM because you use exactly the same phones and smartphones as the ones sold by GSM carriers all over the world, like Nokia 2730, BB Bold 9700, or iPhone 3G, all now available at Bell.

Bell and Telus invested millions of dollars in this new network, according to some estimates in the business press, a few billion, and they didn't do it to keep paying for maintenance of both CDMA and HSPA networks that mostly overlap each other. This is most likely the end of CDMA in Canada.

If you shop for a new phone or smartphone with Bell or Telus, you need to do some investigative work, study all the frequency bands, especially if you do lots of travelling, both in N.America or overseas. Bell must have huge inventory of now mostly obsolete CDMA handsets and they will be trying to push them on unsuspecting customers for the next few months. CDMA phone is only required if you need coverage in those places in Canada where the new HSPA network is not available yet, and also in some parts of the USA, everywhere else in the world you need a GSM phone.

The following set of frequencies will get your GSM handset working mostly everywhere, but not all GSM handsets support all frequencies, so check what you really need before you buy:

I'm curious too. For now, they are just trying to avoid the term GSM, in their marketing campaign it hasn't been used even once. They hope that most customers are not very technically sophisticated and will do whatever sales reps tell them to do.

With CDMA, three year estimate sounds reasonable, although, considering how slow Bell was to replace analogue hardware with 1x in N.Ontario, it can be much longer than that. They will probably do the necessary maintenance around big cities, but if some hardware goes bust in Happy Valley Goose Bay or other remote place, they will simply retire it and offer customers a discount on a new GSM phone.

Another interesting issue is Manitoba and Sask., they have their own carriers (MTS and SaskTel), which for now are sticking with CDMA, we will see for how long.

I have also fund Bell and Telus forums on CrackBerry site, much bigger traffic than here:

I'm curious about MTS and Sasktel as well, how will their users use the network outside of the province once CDMA is gone? I was actually browsing Sasktel's website today to see if they were gsm or not, I've never seen such a plain webpage haha.

To be honest, you sound like a dealer. Do you work for Wireless Wave perhaps? The general consumer isn't as informed as you.

No, I'm not a dealer, but I travel a lot, both for business and pleasure, including Canada's North, so I was aware for years how weired the coverage was in Canada. Then I also started going overseas and when my CDMA phone was stubbornly dead no matter which country I went, I decided to take a serious look at all those technical standards.

Not yet, I'll keep watching the coverage maps, I need N.Ontario, and Manitoba, Sask. occasionally too. I've seen on other forums people actually migrating back to CDMA, not because of coverage but because they had some connectivity issues. The new network doesn't seem to be as stable as the old one at this point. Anyone jumping in at this early stage is a guinea pig. These technical quirks should be worked out in a matter of two three months.

The only problem with Rogers has always been relatively small size of their network. Rogers phone will work in Varna (Bulgaria), Dunedin (NZ) and Abu Dhabi (UAE) , but it's dead in Dryden, Ontario, just 400 km east of Winnipeg. It's kind of funny.

Yeah, Bell and Telus both have better coverage in some of the small areas, Rogers coverage is mostly in the more condensed areas.

I live in the lower mainland, I've never had a problem with coverage where I live, so it's not something that matters to me. And a Rogers phone will work in most countries based on that carriers coverage that they have an agreement with.

Only time I don't have coverage is going through the canyons between Burnaby and Prince George